Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca is a writer-editor for ZDNet, contributor to CNET and the editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. In 2013, his coverage will focus on enterprise startups. He is based in New York.
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
There is the old rule of thumb that says "never buy a car the first year it is introduced" and similarly, "don't buy an OS until after the first service pack ships," but waiting until 2008 to upgrade to an OS that ships in 2006 is ridiculous. (And the idea of waiting for the first service pack to ship is probably pretty dumb too.
Good news for military (or financial) controllers who sit at a desk with a half-dozen PCs when one secure one would do.
As part of our ongoing CIO Sessions series to find out what's on the minds of CIOs, I interviewed Bruce Carver, CIO of Dana Corp., a $9 billion auto parts manufacturer.
Since this seems to be DRM Day at Between the Lines, allow me to present a short, personal story that highlights, at least for me, the evils of DRM and the DCMA. Last week, I prepared a story for this blog illustrating how to put shows from a TiVo onto one of the new video iPods.
Earlier today, I wrote a blog entry entitled The day the broadcast died. It talks about how the RSS subscription protocol has been married to TV programming in a way that could completely disintermediate the current channels of TV program distribution.
Today is the day that TV and radio broadcasters around the world (and digital video recorder makers like TiVo) dreaded would come. It's the day that someone married the RSS subscription protocol to Bittorrent in a way that turns the Internet into one big giant and free TiVo machine.
Are you hoping that Santa will put a portable audio player in your stocking this year? Or, are you thinking about stuffing someone else's stocking with one.
News.com's Ina Fried has the scoop some internal documents from Microsoft ruminating on ad-supported software that leverages its new adCenter platform, beyond Office Live and Windows Live.
In his recent blog titled "Recipe for Winning Chip Battles," Sun's Jonathan Schwartz makes a case for his company's ascendency based on having a high volume operating system (Solaris, with reportedly more than 3.2 million downloads since it went open source, mostly on non-Sun hardware) and what he calls the fastest chip on earth, the soon to be released, power sipping UltraSPARC T1 (formerly known as Niagara).
Over the weekend, fellow ZDNet blogger George Ou wrote to me to say I might be interested some math he did in a recent blog -- math that for fun, I'm now calling George's Law. George's Law appears in his blog about certain types of WiFi access points and how long their user-defined pass phrases should be in order to minimize the chances of a hacker gaining access to information that was thought to be protected through encryption.